Browsing by Subject "queer"
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Item Carceral Normativities: Sex, Security, and the Penal Management of Gender Nonconformity(2014-11) Vitulli, Elias"Carceral Normativities: Sex, Security, and the Penal Management of Gender Nonconformity" examines the history of the incarceration of transgender and gender nonconforming people in the US from the early twentieth century to the present. While rarely discussed in prison scholarship and activism, gender nonconforming and transgender prisoners have garnered intense scrutiny from prison administrators and have experienced persistent and pervasive violence. Through archival and legal research, I historicize this violence, arguing that for the last century prison administrators have labeled gender nonconformity as a threat to institutional security or, as I call it, as queer dangerousness, which has structured penal practices and policies used to manage these prisoners and normalized violence against them. I argue that this construction of gender nonconformity as security threat is produced from a set of institutionalized logics, which I call racialized gender normativity. "Carceral Normativities" examines often overlooked and continually evolving prison policies and practices to trace the history of the construction of gender nonconformity as queer dangerousness and institutional security threat as well as how racialized gender normativity has been constructed and reconstructed as a constitutive logic of the prison system. Chapter One examines the history of the construction of penal sex-segregation alongside newspaper stories from the mid-twentieth century of penal administrators "discovering" sexually "misclassified" prisoners in their institutions, in order to argue that the prison system's programmatic design and core understandings of rehabilitation and incorrigibility have been deeply shaped by racialized gender normativity, which produced the imperative to sex-segregate and constructed sexual ambiguity as administrative disorder. Chapter Two traces the history of the systematic segregation of gender nonconforming and transgender prisoners, which began in the early twentieth century and continues into the present, and argues that this segregation was created as a management tool as prison administrators began to identify gender nonconformity as a threat to institutional security, or as queer dangerousness. Chapter Three examines the relationship between dominant penological, social scientific, and legal narratives about sexual violence in penal institutions and the use of sexual violence as a tool of control--a practice I call carceral sexual violence. I argue that narratives, which portray prisons as sites of rampant sexual violence entirely perpetrated by prisoners, construct transgender and gender nonconforming prisoners as simultaneously unrapable and constantly subject to sexual violence, which justifies and obscures many quotidian forms of carceral sexual violence that target gender nonconformity. Chapter Four examines federal civil rights litigation regarding access to hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgery for transgender women and argues that carceral necropower, or the production of the prison as a space of death and prisoners as socially dead, and the racialized gender normative construction of gender nonconformity as queer dangerousness securitizes gender-affirming medical treatment in prisons, constructing security concerns as a primary factor determining access to such treatment. Most broadly, "Carceral Normativities" expands our understanding of how the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality shapes carceral constructions of deviance and dangerousness as well as penal policies and practices.Item Exceptionally Queer: Mormon Peculiarity and US Exceptionalism(2017-06) Mohrman, Katherine A.Mormonism has been contested in US popular culture and politics ever since the founding of the Latter-day Saint faith tradition in the early nineteenth century. Exceptionally Queer examines these contestations – whether it be the nineteenth-century uproar over polygamy or the twentieth-century controversy over the LDS Church’s stance on gay marriage – by identifying and analyzing “Mormon peculiarity” as an enduring, but until now, unnamed discourse which actively produces its subject as inherently odd, unique, or strange. The project explores the varying, and at times contradictory, articulations of Mormon peculiarity to expose Mormonism as a potent and productive discursive assemblage – not an inherent aspect of LDS religion, culture, or history – which has become central to shaping notions of “Americanness” through the production of sexual and racial normativity. Specifically, the dissertation contends that Mormon peculiarity discourse has been vital to the processes of Othering through which “Americanness” has been and continues to be defined not just as Protestant and capitalist, but as heteronormative and white. Since Mormonism is most frequently identified as strange because of the sexual, marital, and kinship practices of its adherents, the dissertation examines the role discourse about it has played in the production of sexual normativity in the US, arguing that claims of sexual development, civilization, or normalcy made in relation to Mormonism are also essentially racial claims that have helped to forward white supremacy as a national project. Refuting the characterization of Mormonism as an outlier or anomaly on the US historical and cultural landscape, the project highlights the pivotal role it has played in developing US identity, nationalism, and empire.Item Invisible Men: The Risks and Pleasures of Self-Portrayal in the Work of Contemporary American Male Artists(2014-05) DeLand, LaurenThis dissertation examines the rare phenomenon of self-portrayal in the work of contemporary American male artists. The feminist art movement of the 1970s provided the aegis for many women artists to challenge the gendered dichotomy of artist/subject via the strategic deployment of their own bodies as artistic subjects. Yet remarkably little study has been dedicated to the question of why male artists so rarely make their own, allegedly privileged bodies the subjects of their work. I propose that the shifting definitions of masculinity in postwar America have in fact produced a stringently regulated economy of images of the male body. In four case studies of four contemporary American male artists (Kenneth Anger, Ron Athey, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Glenn Ligon), I employ visual analysis and comparative readings of juridical rulings and institutional policies that dictate the state of the body in contemporary American art.Item MFA Creative Thesis; Welcome to the Ergosphere(University of Minnesota, Department of Art, 2017-05-17) petersen, alex mMFA Creative Thesis in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Master of Fine Arts Degree in Art. An exploration of queer fantasy, drawing, and theoretical processes. Submitted by alex m. petersen. May 17th, 2017.Item Muxerista Activist Consciousness Development Framework(2024-03) Orozco, Roberto C.The outcome of this study was the Muxerista Activist Consciousness Development Framework as a guiding model for identity and socio-political consciousness development for queer Latinx/a/o college student activists. This framework encompasses the cognitive (knowledge and thoughts), behavioral (engaging in actions), social-political (focus on identities and social structures of power), and corporeal (focus on the physical body) reality of queer Latinx/a/o students. I build on Anzaldúa’s (2002) path of conocimiento and present the five overarching findings of this framework. These include: 1) sites of ruptures and heridas (wounds), 2) dismemberment of the mind/body, 3) claiming a Muxerista Jotería consciousness, 4) healing as a Muxerista praxis, and 5) imagining possibilities…visionary organizing. These generated themes include subthemes that speak to the nuances of each of the collaborator’s narratives and experiences that inform the meaning making process of queer Latinx/a/o students’ identity and socio-political consciousness development. Lastly, this study has implications for queer Latinx/a/o college students and higher education and student affairs practice and research.Item Natural Mentoring Relationships And Parent-Child Attachment Among Queer Emerging Adults(2024-03) Burningham, KalebQueer youth and young adults often experience challenges in their familial relationships, particularly with their parents, related to their queer identity. Combined with the minority stress they already face and the added weight of other external stressors, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a dire need to examine methods of prevention and intervention to help them successfully transition to adulthood as their most authentic selves. Natural mentoring relationships are a type of nonparental adult support formed organically within the mentee’s existing social network (e.g., teachers or grandparents) that have been shown to be helpful despite risk status (Van Dam et al., 2018) and even posited to be a corrective attachment experience (Rhodes et al., 2006). The aims of the two studies in my dissertation were to a) examine the current state of natural mentoring among queer emerging adults using a new, original dataset focused on a contemporary sample representative of race and sexual and gender diversity (Study 1), and b) to determine if natural mentoring moderates the association between the parent-child relationship and suicidality, psychological distress, and the use of substances to cope during a particularly stressful time—the COVID-19 pandemic (Study 2). Participants were 413 emerging adults (ages 18-25, M = 21.53 years) in the United States. Approximately 35% (n = 146) were trans (i.e., participants who identify with a gender other than their sex-assigned-at-birth) and roughly 50% (n = 200) were emerging adults of color (non-exclusive categories). Data were collected at the height of the omicron variant outbreak during the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants were recruited on the Prolific research platform, and stratified sampling was used to recruit participants who identified as a gender other than their sex assigned-at-birth and racial and ethnic minorities. Using a descriptive design (Study 1), I examined the prevalence, characteristics, quality, and acceptance of natural mentoring relationships. Most study participants reported having natural mentors and these relationships were of relatively high quality. Additionally, most participants perceived that their mentor had at least a somewhat positive attitude toward their queer identity. Results also showed that natural mentoring relationships lasted longer when mentors and mentees shared the same race. Following the descriptive study, linear regression was used (Study 2) to explore whether the parent-child relationship predicted suicidality, psychological distress, and the use of substances to cope and then to determine if aspects of natural mentoring buffered those associations. Findings showed that parent-child attachment quality predicted psychological distress and suicidality but not the use of substances to cope. Furthermore, there were no significant moderating effects. Significantly, mentor acceptance of the mentee’s gender identity predicted lower psychological distress. Findings also showed that trans emerging adults experience higher psychological distress, a lesser likelihood of having a mentor, and lower parent-child attachment quality than their sexual minority cisgender peers. All in all, results of these two studies indicate that natural mentoring relationships are a relatively accessible resource for queer emerging adults and that these relationships tend to be high quality (i.e., emotionally close and that mentors were accepting of the mentee’s queer identity) but that there still needs to be considerable focus on the parent-child relationship, even if the youth are young adults. Natural mentoring can complement parenting, but it cannot supplant it. It is also crucial to connect queer emerging adults with mentors who share their identities and experiences, particularly for trans emerging adults and queer emerging adults of color. Future research should continue to examine natural mentoring in the context of other influential attachment relationships and attachment experiences. The implementation of longitudinal or mixed-methods designs is also needed. Importantly, there needs to be a higher emphasis on exploring natural mentoring relationships among trans emerging adults to connect them with mentors who can support them in a discriminatory sociopolitical landscape.Item (Un)even Terrain: Queer and Trans Staff Experiences Building Affinity, Community, and Kinship at the University of Minnesota(2024-06) Williams, JohnIn the United States, there is currently an alarming rise in legislative attacks on queer and trans people through an increase in anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and over 515 anti-LGBTQ+ bills being tracked by American Civil Liberties Union (see Figure 1; ACLU, 2024). This wave of legislative hostility towards queer and trans people, compounded by simultaneous efforts against critical race theory (CRT) and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), magnifies the impact on queer and trans people of color (QTPOC), who already face intersecting forms of discrimination and marginalization. These bills and rhetoric reinforce racism, heterosexism, and trans oppression that negatively impact and shape conditions for queer and trans people in U.S. educational settings (Duran & Coloma, 2023). At the same time, there has been a heightened visibility of queer and trans people in higher education and growth in the presence of Gender and Sexuality Centers (GSCs) on college and university campuses. This increased visibility and presence of GSCs coincided with greater attention on queer and trans student identity development with a greater understanding of intersecting identities (e.g., Duran et al., 2017; Goode-Cross & Good, 2009; Goode-Cross & Tager, 2011; Narui, 2011) and assessments of campus climate (Lange et al., 2019; Pryor & Hoffman, 2021; Pryor et al., 2023; Renn, 2010). However, much of the scholarship has centered on the student experience, while queer and trans staff remain an under-researched population in the study of higher education, especially queer and trans staff and faculty of color (Aguilar & Johnson, 2017; Renn, 2010; e.g., Sérráno & Gonzalez, 2022). This study explores the experiences of queer and trans higher education staff who work outside of GSCs. While GSCs serve as vital roles for support and advocacy, there exists a significant number of queer and trans staff who navigate landscapes outside these designated spaces, where acceptance and safety may be less assured. By focusing on this demographic, this research aims to fill critical gaps in existing literature and broaden the discourse surrounding queer and trans experiences in academia and shift the narrative to include how they are building community, affinity, and kinship.